Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  When I was to make Rachel’s personal acquaintance, some years ago, friends dragged me miles out into the country, where her family had taken summer quarters. I arrive at long last, I am invited to sit at a table, Papa Rachel appears, then Mama Rachel, la soeur Rachel, le frère Rachel. “Where is Rachel, then?” I asked. “Elle est sortie,” they answered; “mais voilà toute sa famille!” At that I began to laugh as though I had gone mad. For I then remembered the anecdote of the man who goes to see a monster which was said to have been produced by crossing a carp with a rabbit. When he arrives and asks, “Where is the monster?” he is told: “We have sent it to the museum; but here are the carp and the rabbit—see for yourself!”—I shall never forget my insane laughter and the way it astonished the civilized Frenchmen around me.

  S. S. Prawer points out that often, in Heine’s oeuvre, “the analogy … for his Jewish artist figure is that of a fairground freak.” The contrast drawn by the German-Jewish poet between himself, insanely laughing, and the “civilized Frenchmen” backs up the other one between the real, freakish Rachel (tellingly absent, as tellingly figured by her appalling family) and her too exalted reputation. The poet may have been playing lightly with the image of Rachel as an animal when he dismissed her elsewhere as bête (stupid). Was his intense dislike rooted in resentment of a woman who could make a career of flinging her Jewishness in the face of Christian society—while many ambitious Jewish men felt obliged to convert, as he had done, for the sake of their careers? Would a performer like George Eliot’s Jewish princess in Daniel Deronda, who repudiates her father’s religion, have seemed to him more or less of a monster? That the Félix family was a pack of carnival tricksters exhibiting a profitable freak merely capped the comic circumstance of a muse’s having any kind of family at all. Of a Jewish muse.

  The woman who charmed Chateaubriand at l’Abbaye aux Bois as a girl almost certainly never read Le Génie du christianisme, in which he wrote that Phèdre is more sublime than its classical model because “this is not a woman in the ancient mode; she is the outcast Christian, the sinner fallen alive into the hands of God: her words are the words of the damned.” It was ironic that the Christianized French Phèdre should be played by a Jew—a point not lost on latter-day romantics, whose consciousness of history and their place in it was—Heine said it—ironic. The fashionable secular religion of classical tragedy, with its Jewish high priestess, seemed to many a decadent cult or a vulgar one, or both. In his journal for 1843, Victor Hugo noted a friend’s scornful witticism: “M. Nestor Roqueplan said to me the other day, ‘society people go to see tragedies now as women of easy virtue go to Mass.’ ”

  Reverence was compounded with prurient curiosity. When Raphaël Félix played Hippolyte to Rachel’s Phèdre, and their younger sister Rébecca played Aricie, the incest theme was exaggerated, Gautier noted; the spectacle of two sisters as rivals for their own brother produced a deliberately bizarre effect. The sexual anxieties of the audience were exacerbated by fear of foreigners. Gérard de Nerval was inspired to sneer inaccurately in L’Artiste that “Father Félix, who had previously appeared as an actor at the Frankfurt theater, could have taken on the role of Theseus, and the play could have been kept entirely within the family—but that they were afraid of his Germanic pronunciation, and therefore had to accept a fourth actor, of different blood.”

  Napoleon too had found significant roles for his relatives to play: people might have accurately observed that this particular repetition of history was just asking to be seen as farce. There were comments about “a Rachelian progeny,” and remarks on the conspicuous neglect of actors “not descended from Jacob in general and Father Félix specifically.” People asked one another in genuine or mock horror, What polluting deities or demons were being worshiped at the temple of art called the Théâtre-Français?

  4. STATUE

  From her first performances of classical roles, everyone compared Rachel to a marble statue—because of her pallor, and the sense perhaps of her bony body’s hardness; because she was haloed by the aura of the ancient Greeks, whose statues were their most enduring legacy because of the confident quiet majesty with which she stalked onto a stage and stood still for a moment before she spoke; because her eloquent rare gestures were restrained; and of course because the trope was current. By embodying an ideal of classical art, and the hieratic power of a priestess or icon, she increased that trope’s currency.

  She carried herself with grace and a dignity that was the more striking because she was small. Obedient to the code of gestures developed by the Comédie-Française—the hands never to be lifted above the head, no more than they were in ancient sculptures; the head to be turned only so far to the left, at precisely this juncture—she modified it in its own spirit, by further restraint. If her meager body was merely the foil to her wonderfully rich voice, that body’s tension and its stillness were also compelling, conveying the sense that statues give us of space mastered and time stood still—the sense that the most profound meaning is mute. Diderot, who had loved the sculptor’s art as well as the actors, had been critical of the traditional postures of the Comédie-Française. He had much admired David Garrick in an affecting dumbshow he saw the English actor perform for friends: Diderot noticed that he deployed his body so that every pose and movement counted, invested it with meaning as a sculptor invests marble. Rachel, like Garrick and every great actor, could charge a stance or a gesture with emotion or intention, express murderous hatred by the way she pointed her finger. She avoided extravagant theatrical flourishes along with declamation; mostly, she stood still. Because one paid attention to her voice above all, her few, very controlled gestures seemed the more remarkable: it was as if a statue moved.

  Gautier insisted tirelessly on the image, even when he described her play—like a film critic avant la lettre—as a series of frames. She had, he wrote, “no particular knowledge of the plastic arts or taste for them,” but nevertheless “a profound sense of statuary.” Not only her poses but her features, he thought, “arranged themselves naturally in a sculptural manner, and broke down into a series of bas-reliefs.” The statuesque quality of her Phèdre moved him to ecstasies: “If only you knew how the chaste, pure folds of her white tunic delineate her noble movements, her contained gestures! How dark and deep is her eye in her mask of pale marble! How elegantly the line of her delicate throat leads to her shoulders!” His taste for women of stone can be dismissed as peculiar: in an autobiographical essay, Gautier recalled his shock on first seeing a naked female model in art school, and confessed his continuing preference for statues over fleshly women. In his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, one very refined young man declares, “Sculpture is as real as anything which is utterly counterfeit can be; it is three-dimensional, casts a shadow and can be handled. Your sculptured mistress differs from your real one solely in that she is a little harder to the touch and does not speak—two very trifling defects!” Gautier’s enthusiasm for Rachel is not untainted by pride in an aesthete’s higher standards, his sense of his own difference from the mob of ordinary, sensual Frenchmen who found her homely. After her death he recalled that “her misunderstood beauty—for she was admirably beautiful—had nothing coquettish, pretty, in a word, French, about it. For a long time she was considered ugly, but meanwhile artists lovingly studied and represented as a paradigm of perfection that black-eyed mask taken from the very face of Melpomene!” To see a woman as a muse was the mark of an artist’s ability to savor the spirit as other men relish the flesh. Gautier’s love of contradictions and his ideal of art as difficulty overcome informed his admiration of Rachel: in “Art,” his most celebrated lyric, he declares, “Yes, the work of art emerges more beautiful from a form that resists working, verse, marble, onyx, enamel. / No false hindrances! but to march straight, put on, O Muse, a narrow buskin.”

  But he was by no means the only writer to insist that Rachel was like a statue. The image was widely reiterated: it linked her to classical art and to death, to powerfu
l primitive deities and decorative objects, to malleable Galatea and mad Medusa, whose look turns men to stone. Under the intense psychological pressure that was generated by her performances and reflected in her fame, current tropes coalesced into a single phallic object: a woman with snakes for hair who turned men rigid, an evil Other diabolically distorted and disguised. (“She is not a woman—she is a snake,” wrote Charlotte Brontë.) Rachel the pythonisse, or prophetess, slid into Rachel the terrifying python. (Mrs. Siddons before her, and George Sand in her own time, were also called pythonesses.) The image served to marry—among other apparent opposites—the savage and the sacred; it posed and seemed ready to resolve the paradox of an artifact that could act. The critic Paul de Saint-Victor, her sister Lia’s lover, would reflect in marmoreal imagery on Rachel’s whole career, after her death: “The entrance of Mlle Rachel, draped in the tunic of a statue, into the theater of her time, with its new plays and poetic license, was a revelation and an enchantment, and had the effect produced by the great Venus de Milo which, scarcely retrieved from the dust, reduced all would-be masterpieces to an inferior rank.” Subjecting herself to the rigidities of old plays and selecting new roles to suit her statue image, she rang changes on the theme of a woman hard and soft. In Soumet’s Jeanne d’Arc, in 1846, she wore a cunning costume of metal and cloth. Gérard de Nerval wrote that she had been “seduced” by the inferior play only because it gave her an opportunity to “realize,” in armor, a well-known statue of the Maid of Orléans sculpted by the Princesse Marie, a daughter of Louis-Philippe. Rachel was beautiful, he wrote, “in physiognomy and in attitude. The steel armor, however implausible it was in a prison, suits her to perfection.” Implausible and unnatural, she was on her way, as Jeanne d’Arc, to being recognized as the embodied emblem of a glorious, virtuous, martial, monarchical France. When France, within two years, became a republic, and Marianne replaced Jeanne as the nation’s symbol, artists competing in a government-sponsored contest for designs of stamps and public monuments were advised to find their model in Rachel. Reiterated and reified, the sculptural trope insisted that she was something between an artist and a work of art, between individual and representative, person and representation—therefore that she was unique and not quite human.

  When Mlle Contat had giggled that Talma, in his toga, looked just like a statue, the point of the simile had been quite different. Talma in his plain republican cloth, in 1789, had been the inspiring image of a citizen; half a century later, Rachel evoked another set of associations. First of all, the severely elegant costume Gautier described her as wearing for Phèdre was a far cry from Camille’s simple toga. The beauties of her diadem and veil, her peplum sprinkled with gold, her tunic and purple mantle, all in the best possible taste, were admired for their gorgeousness, and cited as proof that she was every inch the queen. Theatrical togas had lost their simplicity after Napoleon’s Roman fever converted the classical style into a mode of luxury. Forty years before Rachel first played Phèdre, when the Empress Joséphine had presided over a contest between rival tragedy queens rendering the role, she underwrote the lavish costumes of Mlles Duchesnois and George: a blue cashmere mantle, simply embroidered, for George and a red one with stars for Duchesnois together required more than a dozen yards of fabric, and their tunics called for an additional half-dozen yards of percale. Talma’s costume had made a political point about change and republicanism, and promised new heroic action, but in the 1840s the so-called revival of high tragedy looked like an exercise in intransigence and nostalgia—art for artifice’s sake, or artificiality’s.

  Rachel, statue by Antoine-Laurent Dantan, 1839 (photo credit 4.16)

  Rachel was sometimes compared to a statue in order to make the point that she was implausible and false. Heine declared himself disgusted by the ghosts that stalked the stage of the Théâtre-Français; Baudelaire, in 1846, described the house on the rue de Richelieu as “the most deserted theater in the universe,” where audiences were persuaded to believe in people who never existed. He attacked arid classicism in realism’s name, asking, “Have you ever seen tragic persons eat or drink?” Writers of tragedy, he wrote, distorted the truth of human nature: they “have … created their own temperament, whereas the majority of mankind have to submit to theirs.” The fleshy Italian actress Adelaide Ristori, whose popularity helped Rachel decide to flee Paris for America in 1855, was of the opinion—she set it down in her memoirs—that her rival clung to the classical repertoire and the toga largely in order to conceal her frightful skinniness. But to those inclined to suspend disbelief, Rachel was a Tragic Muse in her toga—a rarefied idea. Some of the medallions and miniatures and statues artists made of Rachel were realistic, recognizable portraits; but the reiterated statue image linked her to an abstract ideal or idea. The statue that Talma, in his toga, recalled would have been a portrait bust of a Greek or Roman hero or statesman; but the marble figure of a woman would most likely be a goddess or an allegorical representation, or something in between. Anyone could gather as much at the Louvre (where, they said, the young Rachel had been taken by her father to study the statues’ poses). Marina Warner writes that “the female form tends … to symbolic interpretation; the male resists anonymous universality more robustly, and often manages to retain individuality even while calling higher things to mind.” The marble figures sculpted (around Rachel’s time) to guard the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides might be marshaled to illustrate the insight: while the forms of men represent historical individuals, the alternating images of women are allegorical. Tragedy was a statue by the mid-nineteenth century: in the portraits of Rachel by Amaury-Duval and Gérôme, the stone statue of a muse or goddess or priestess stands beside the central figure to insist on the point.

  To compare a living woman to a statue is to freeze and fix and control her, also to aggrandize her beyond mere womanhood into abstraction or even goddess-head: “Rachel is an antique statue, which is to say, something like ideal beauty,” wrote one commentator. The comparison serves to deprive her of individuality; it also makes the connection between Woman and stone. Melpomene blends easily into Galatea, into Medusa. Either Rachel, imagined as stone, was unfeeling and stony, or her baleful look turned those who looked at her to stone, or both. “Her gaze, the eyes enlarged by sorrow, expressed the most violent despair; it was the head of Medusa,” one admirer wrote of her. Another image managed to confound the actress and the audience, the victim and the aggressor, by wreathing together the woman and the snake: writing of Rachel as Cleopatra, one critic claimed that he could perceive, “beneath the sculptural folds of her tunic, the moving serpents that sting our breast” (my italics). The persistent statue image blurred the distinction between the mover and the thing being moved. In America, a critic characterized Rachel’s Camille as “a severe classic figure, a polychrome statue, gliding past the columns”; her Phèdre was admired “for the display of the statuesque grace which is one of Rachel’s most marvellous attributes.” The critic concluded in some confusion that “Rachel is certainly … the first of sculptors,” adding that “she seems a goddess chiselled by Phidias in ivory and gold.” Repeated, elaborated, literalized and turned on itself, the statue image conjured her strangeness most of all: goddess or priestess of a classical past, marble, not flesh, artist and artifact, she stood for the joined othernesses of Woman and Art, and beyond that for the notion that both were more and less than real. The statue image so often used to class her with the immortals could also condemn her as ephemeral: an 1852 article in the Revue et gazette des théâtres described the Comédie-Française as the temple of a “cult of abstractions, of which Rachel is a lively but fleeting expression.” A sign of an abstraction, she seemed by virtue of her corporeality to partake of abstraction’s immateriality: illogically, incontrovertibly, the comparison with a marble statue insisted on it.

  IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, genteel ladies entertained themselves and their admirers at parties with tableaux vivants. As novelists delight in showing, the game poin
ted up the emphasis on display and disguise of the female body in social life, and the habit of hypocrisy. Ladies gender-bound to role-playing were obliged to present smooth, objectified public selves, concealing and misrepresenting—and broadly hinting at—their hidden selves. In Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth chooses to play the role of Hermione, the queen who is turned to stone and then to flesh again in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, in a tableau vivant accompanied by music. She is poised at the point where the queen must come magically and dramatically back to life when a too emphatic chord on the piano—played by her mother—causes a little door in the wall to fly open; it conceals a painting of a “dead face” that holds inexpressible terrors for Gwendolen, and she is struck stone-still in terror in earnest. Daniel Deronda explores, among other things, the erotics of dominance and submission in which coldness, real or assumed, inspires intense feeling.

  Rachel, ivory statue by Jean-Auguste Barre, exhibited at the Salon of 1849 (photo credit 4.18)

  The games played in English country houses had their more overtly salacious counterparts in very different social events like Louis Véron’s celebrated suppers, for which naked girls were hired to assume provocative poses plastiques. A social and literary cliché, the statue-woman was susceptible to different emphases. Germaine de Staël described the heroine of Corinne as “a woman renowned only for the gifts of genius,” notable for “her tall full figure reminiscent of Greek statuary.” Balzac, on the other hand, invidiously compares his hard-eyed and heartless society women to paintings, statues, and—the transition is smooth—to consummate actresses, that is, hypocrites. In Mérimée’s story “La Vénus d’Ille,” a statue—a primitive goddess dug up by archaeologists—comes sufficiently to life to attack men who don’t respect what it stands for, the power of woman and love. In George Sand’s Lélia (1833), the poet Sténio hotly adores the tormented, haughty, unresponsive heroine because she is cold and pale as death, and unearthly: “Pale as one of those marble statues which guard tombs, you no longer had anything terrestrial about you,” he writes to her. Lélia transcends both the earth and death, stands for love and flees it; she is frigid, as the gossips said Sand herself was. (Creature and creator both have duly been read as Phallic Woman.) Lélia’s stony appearance indicates her contempt for the flesh, lends her glamour, and suggests her spiritual power: “With her impassive air, her pale, cold brow, and her rich clothing, she resembled one of those alabaster madonnas that Italian women devotedly cover with silken robes and brilliant chiffon. Like the marble Virgin, Lélia was insensitive to her beauty and charm. She was indifferent to the eyes fixed upon her. She despised all the men too much to take pride in their praise.” Her lack of responsiveness is a sign of her superiority to the things and the people of this world. At a ball, she is aware that all eyes are on her; refusing to be a mere object of the gaze, she looks back boldly at her admirers—as if she were at a theater, Sand writes, watching the people displaying themselves there. Among them she finds her lost sister, the courtesan Pulchérie, who is at once her antithesis and her second self. When Pulchérie agrees to pretend to be Lélia in bed, so as to fool Lélia’s would-be lover—as Rachel would urge Sarah Félix to do, when she wanted to trick Prince Napoleon—she confirms Lélia’s own theatricality, her being both herself and not herself, false and true. Known to be the work of the notorious George Sand, the novel invites reading as a spectacle of the (pseudonymous, role-playing) author doubling herself, the woman writer taking on, taking and making over, the meanings of the image of the statue-woman, by merging her own image into it.